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Newly certified statewide programmatic environmental impact review aims to protect Californians from catastrophic wildfires
The California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection has certified a new program that it says will help minimize wildland fire risk across the state while ensuring the highest level of environmental oversight.
The California Vegetation Treatment Program, or CalVTP, will create efficiencies within the regulatory process to scale up fuel treatment and forest restoration projects toward meeting the state’s goal of treating 500,000 acres of non-federal lands annually.
“I commend the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection for working with the environmental community, state regulators and public safety officials to develop a long-term solution to increase the pace and scale of critical vegetation treatment in a way that safely and responsibly protects our environment,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom. “The scale of the wildfire crisis in California is unprecedented, and we need a response to match the scale and severity of this challenge.”
Improved vegetation treatments, including fuel breaks that slow wildfires to protect communities, and projects that restore natural fire regimes, are part of a suite of actions Gov. Newsom called for within days of assuming office earlier this year.
Other priority actions include hardening homes and improving communities’ preparation to survive wildfire.
The CalVTP reflects more than a decade of careful work to analyze potential environmental impacts associated with different types of vegetation management, consistent with the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA.
This programmatic analysis will reduce redundancies in each project’s environmental review by allowing project sponsors to build upon verified environmental analysis contained in the CalVTP as they begin their site-specific study for their individual projects.
Earlier this year, citing extreme peril posed by megafires, Gov. Newsom declared a state of emergency to fast-track 35 critical forest-management projects to protect more than 200 of California’s highest-risk communities and redirected National Guard members from the border to undertake fire prevention activities throughout the state.
To ensure necessary work could get underway immediately, the emergency proclamation suspended certain requirements and regulations as needed to carry out its directives, including CEQA.
By expediting the process, these emergency projects are on track to finish in less than one year, rather than a typical pace of three to five years.
In November, two of these emergency fuel breaks were used to protect Santa Barbara residents during the wind-driven Cave fire, resulting in no lives or structures lost.
As part of the long-term solution, Cal Fire developed the CalVTP to enable projects to move forward efficiently while maintaining and protecting California’s diverse vegetation and habitats.
State officials said the program will help Cal Fire and other public agencies comply with CEQA while delivering projects more quickly and affordably on over 20 million acres of land that is the responsibility of the state.
Projects that will benefit from CalVTP include:
– Wildland-urban interface fuel reduction, including removal of vegetation to prevent or slow the spread of fires between wildlands and buildings.
– Fuel breaks that support fire suppression activities by providing emergency responders with strategic staging areas and access to otherwise remote landscapes for fire control.
– Restoration in ecosystems where natural fire regimes have been altered due to fire exclusion, including restoring ecological processes, conditions, and resiliency to more closely reflect historic vegetative composition, structure, and habitat values.
The CalVTP does not support commercial timber harvest or development.
To further achieve wildfire resilience in California, the state continues to work with federal partners, including the U.S. Forest Service. The federal government owns nearly 58 percent of California’s forestlands. The state owns 3 percent, while 40 percent is privately held.
To protect public safety and ecology, experts agree 1 million acres of California forest and wildlands must be treated annually across jurisdictions. The federal government is working to match the state’s 500,000-acre annual treatment goals, though it has been hampered by years of federal budget and staffing cuts.
While the CalVTP is a critical tool to responsibly scale up vegetation treatment on state- and privately-owned land, state officials said efforts must simultaneously scale up on federal land.